


catch you

by ninemoons42



Series: Dragon Effect - Annika [7]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mass Effect
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Late Night Conversations, Nightmares, Shepard's bad dreams
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-16
Updated: 2015-11-16
Packaged: 2018-05-01 23:43:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5225714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cullen finds Annika sleeping in his quarters, and finds out what she's running from, even in her dreams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	catch you

There was someone in his bunk. A lean shape under the light blanket. The agitated rhythm of broken dreams, of restlessness. Shadows shifting, and the interplay of red cracks in many-times broken-and-mended skin.

Cullen watched Annika roll over, shaking, graceless words falling from her gasping mouth –- _no no no_ -–

And then her eyes opened. Blue-crackling light flaring up around her unsteady fist, then dying away as she recognized him and recognized the room that she was in -– but she wasn’t quick enough. He saw the deepening hollows of crescent-shaped shadows beneath her eyes. Goosebumps pebbling her skin, the remnants of fight-or-flight. The shaky rasp in her breath.

He stayed where he was, standing next to the bed, patient. 

Rustling. Annika getting to her feet, none too steady. Her lips shaping a word. “Sorry.”

“Did you do something wrong?” Cullen asked. Freed to move now. He took off his jacket and ran his hands through his hair. Fatigue was a tight knot settling in against his temple. He needed to sleep and he needed to rest, but the middle of a war was no place where he could just let go of everything, of the past and of the present and of the future. Of the uncertainties.

Hell, he couldn’t even shake “Eve”’s stories, and she’d said she’d told him about the relatively milder ones. Sympathy ached somewhere in the vicinity of his heart. For a krogan shaman to _need_ to go to such places as she’d talked about –- it made his blood run cold, made him clench his teeth with compassion.

Annika was already at the door. Her hand over the panel -– one gesture was all it would take. She’d be gone and he’d spend the night alone -– and she would be somewhere else on the ship where she would have to be the Commander, even if she desperately needed not to be.

“Shouldn’t be here,” he heard her say.

“Because?” he asked as he toed off his shoes.

“Your place.”

“Which you’re welcome to. How many times do I have to say it?”

“Stubborn,” Annika muttered as she turned. As she leaned against the wall. Slid down, so she was sitting on the floor. 

“You and me,” Cullen said, and went to join her. “I was visiting with Eve.”

“And I thought _Wrex_ was scary,” Annika said. 

He nodded. Picked her hand up from her lap and held it in both of his own. Her fingers, twitching –- he thought he saw the blue of her abilities still prickling beneath the calloused skin. “Bad dreams,” he said, rather than asked. “Why won’t you tell me?”

“You really want to know.”

Instead of saying yes, he brought her hand up to his mouth. He thought he smelled ozone-tang on her skin, and he took a deep breath and pressed a kiss to her palm.

“Cullen,” she said, and took her hand away. 

He let her, and sighed quietly. “I’m sorry. Forget I asked.”

Silence.

He started out of a doze when Annika took his hand and pressed it to her forehead. Glint of a single tear on her cheek. Before he could reach out and wipe it away she whispered, “Didn’t want to tell you what I was seeing. I didn’t want you to have those dreams. Didn’t want you to show up in my dreams. I –- any single one of you. Every single one of you. I’d do anything. Don’t want to add to the voices. So many lost already. So many I could still lose.” 

He’d never heard her speak in such a small voice.

What were words? There wasn’t anything he could say.

He pulled her into his lap, and curled around her. Silence was all that he could offer. 

She shivered in his arms. Her hands clutched at his shirt. Soundless sobs.

**Author's Note:**

> I am also on [tumblr](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/) and my Dragon Age: Inquisition blog is [here](http://ninemoons42-inquisition.tumblr.com/).


End file.
